Raspberry Pi

[MartyG]

I paid £27.28 for the Raspberry Pi Model B (512MB RAM) in early 2014, and thought the Pi 1 launched at £27-29 RRP

The Pi has always been the same price - $35 - right back to its launch.

[Digfox]

The Pi has always been the same price - $35 - right back to its launch.

Yep, 35 USD. But in reality there has been a slight shift in the local UK price.

[MartyG]

Purely down to a weakening pound.

I think suggesting that the price is "creeping up" is a massive stretch, considering what you're getting here for £34, which is the same price as the Pi2B, Pi2B+, Pi3B and Pi3B+. 3GB of RAM isn't free.

[Digfox]

Purely down to a weakening pound.

I think suggesting that the price is "creeping up" is a massive stretch, considering what you're getting here for £34, which is the same price as the Pi2B, Pi2B+, Pi3B and Pi3B+.

Perhaps, I'm probably just looking at it differently from you (and maybe slightly irrationally), which is the best RPi in 2014 cost £27. Now it's £54.

[MartyG]

Because you're getting 3GB more RAM - you expect them to give you that for free? How much would the original Pi have cost in 2012 with 4GB of RAM? Then you have a fair comparison.

[Digfox]

3.5GB actually

Like I say slightly irrational.

[Asura]

[MENTION=2982]Digfox[/MENTION] thanks for your post earlier, I came in here wondering if the new one would fit existing cases. I might just get a 3B+ unless there's a really good reason to wait for cases for the new one to surface.

[MartyG]

I honestly think you'd be mad to buy a 3B+ over the 4B considering the bandwidth improvements on USB alone



Taken from this YouTube vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDnLIBhWxYI

Edit - mine has just shipped so I should have it in the next couple of days to see what's what.

[Digfox]

[MENTION=5941]Asura[/MENTION] - no worries. It is a shame they had to move the network/USB ports around but maybe it just had to be that way. Otherwise it would have made modding a bit easier, but maybe wait until people like [MENTION=42]MartyG[/MENTION] and others have to see what the exact differences are.

Personally I would choose the 4 over the 3B+, because the better CPU, USB 3.0, Gigabit ethernet, Bluetooth 5.0, dual mini HDMI ports for 2 x 4K displays, H265 encoding all for the same price along with other things I might have missed (1GB RAM version). All very compelling reasons for the newer model.

Obviously use case may change that answer, but give it time and software support and accessories will start to appear for the RPi 4. Although Pi Hut are out of both the 1GB and 4GB variants now so maybe another reason to wait might be for supply to come back.

[MartyG]

Interesting that the 2GB model hasn't sold out yet.

Having just checked Pimoroni, they are sold out of all SKUs now.

[Asura]

Personally I would choose the 4 over the 3B+, because the better CPU, USB 3.0, Gigabit ethernet, Bluetooth 5.0, dual mini HDMI ports for 2 x 4K displays, H265 encoding all for the same price along with other things I might have missed (1GB RAM version). All very compelling reasons for the newer model.

Maybe. I'm just interesting in building a universal retro box after cancelling my MD Mini pre-order, so it's about what will do the job.

[Digfox]

Maybe. I'm just interesting in building a universal retro box after cancelling my MD Mini pre-order, so it's about what will do the job.

Depends on games although both might do the job. The 3B+ can struggle with DC, PSP, PS1, DS, N64 and some arcade. Obviously the RPi 4 should struggle with (slightly) less once software supports kicks in. Given no cost difference (i.e. assuming you have to buy all the accessories) it doesn't make sense to buy a 3 anymore unless you need something right this minute, want the cheaper 3A+ (£23) or want to buy second hand (maybe a flood of RPi 3 incoming?).

[MartyG]

Apparently https://www.raspberrypi.org/ is currently being served from Raspberry Pi 4s (I'm guessing load balanced across several of them, rather than just one ).

https://twitter.com/immunda/status/1143093494141132802

More details on the Pi4 cluster here: https://blog.mythic-beasts.com/2019/...-raspberry-pi/

[MartyG]

My Pi 4 boards have arrived, the one from Pi Hut didn't come with the box, just the board in an anti-static bag. There's a 4GB and 1GB model.



I need to sort out the OS images, these boards should be able to boot from USB directly (they're more resilient to corruption on power loss than the uSD cards), then I'll take a look to see what sort of benchmarks we're looking at.

I also recently received the Libre Computers La Frite SBC (this was a kickstarter that was supposed to release October 2018 and they still haven't sorted out OS images for it) and I manage to get hold of an Atomic Pi which should be here tomorrow - this is an x86 board. They come through Amazon international shipping with customs duty already paid; they are repurposed from a robot controller project that failed, but for the cost seemed remarkably powerful little boards.

Previous Pi cases will need a tiny amount of dremmeling to get them to fit, but you're not going to need to take massive chucks out of them and it'll depend on the case, this one has a pretty tight fit on the Pi3


upload a photo

Can't get it to boot from USB, so I hope they haven't removed that feature from RPi4. You can tell the Pi to load the OS from USB after booting initially from uSD, that also stops the SD corruption issue, but it does mean you still have to have the bootstrapper on the uSD card. I will have to get on the Pi forums and have a look.

It's currently running the latest raspbian lite image and I've enabled the SSH, so I'll run some benchmarks in a bit.

[MartyG]

So a quick:

"sysbench --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=20000 --num-threads=4 run" produces the follow results

Raspberry Pi3

total time: 104.4666s
total events: 10000
total time by event execution: 417.7883

Raspberry Pi 4:

Total time: 63.6692s
total events: 10000
total time by event execution: 250.6335

So quite a significant increase in performance calculating prime numbers.

I'll see if I can get retroarch installed, but it's likely I'm going to have to compile from source code as the repositories aren't fully active yet.

Some not so good news on the Kodi front though, from what I've been reading, they won't be supporting the hardware 4K decode until the release of version 19. It might come in the nightly builds earlier, but a stable release isn't likely until 2020.


image upload - I could probably test this against the zero and the Odroid C2, Rock64 and Orange Pi2 when I get a moment.

Some more comprehensive tests here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/ra...cs-benchmarks/

And I have confirmed on the Raspberry Pi forums that the Pi4 won't boot from USB (or network) at the moment, which is actually quite a backwards step. You can use the method I highlighted earlier, you just need to change the boot config on the uSD to point to the USB flashdrive, it's just not the preferable option.

This is going to be addressed in the future apparently.

It seems overclocking them to 1.75GHz isn't problematic either: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews...king,6188.html